Akash Nigam - Genies "The Next Human Race"

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What is going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. And welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. I have a very special guest that.

I had on the show today.

His name is Akash Nigum. He is the founder and CEO of the app Genies. And first things first, I want to apologize for the audio quality on this episode. Due to the coronavirus. I am not traveling right now and I'm having to do my interviews on Skype or on Zoom. And I'm sure you'll be able to notice it on this episode, but other than that, it's an amazing episode. Let me know what you think. Make sure to download Genies today. And other than that, let's get into the show.

So I think for us, like, there's one thing that I'm actually getting, like, tattooed. It's like the cornerstone of this is something that I said in 2015 and we haven't left it since. But it's remain paranoid but never panic. That is like the ultimate. That is like the cornerstone of this company. So we're continuously questioning everything. We're always saying, like, why would that not work? We're remaining paranoid 24 7, but we never panic about the situation. We're always methodically and pragmatically addressing it.

All right, what is going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we have Nigam here with us, and he is the CEO and founder of the app Genies. And I appreciate you coming on the show, man.

Thanks for having me, bro. Appreciate it.

So, real quick, I know I've been following Genies and everything you guys are doing for the past couple of months here since I found out about you guys, but I'd love for you to give a quick overview of what Genies is for the People that may not know yet.

Yeah, no, it's pretty simple. Genies is the next human race. Our goal is to own identity in the digital world. We believe that everybody, especially during a time like this, is going to be transitioning into a digital world and they're going to need an identity in that world. We're trying to create the best, most aesthetically pleasing dynamic avatar there is on the planet. Hoping that that can be everybody's second virtual being.

One thing I did want to bring up is for everyone that's listening to this now, you guys as of yesterday did a partnership with the CDC with the whole coronavirus outbreak. I'd love for you to touch on that because I know that campaign that you guys just did just reached hundreds and millions of people and I'd love for you to talk about with that of how Genies partners up with different brands for brand exposure to really bring exposure in a unique way with these digital avatars.

Yeah, no, no. I mean I think this highlights the power of an avatar, how profound and relevant it can be. Right now the, I guess benefit of an avatar is that it's, it's very, very time efficient. Right. So for the cdc, when they're looking to evangelize hundreds and hundreds of celebrities around the world to do that in the physical world, it takes a year to two years, millions and millions of dollars, the coordination, etc. It's very difficult with an avatar. We were able to do it in under 48 hours. We were able to evangelize people at Russell Westbrook Cardi b offset hundreds of people and they were able to evangelize all their followers in that same light to be able to come around one cause and the cause is really donating to their emergency response fund which is an amazing, amazing effort to be able to help the local communities. But again that can only happen in an avatar digital world. It just can't happen with a physical human.

Totally man. And it's, it's sick. I was looking at your guys website and you guys have a lot of a great case studies of different brands you've worked with and everything that you guys rush you now. But I'm curious, when did this start and how did this idea come about? Because it's funny as I was looking through everything when I first found out about you guys, like you guys are capitalizing like you just said, like a digital avatar is the next human race. And as someone that's a Gen Z myself and like you guys talk about expressing yourself and I'm fascinated by the Whole idea and the whole concept that you guys have built out. And I'd love to hear really how it came about from the idea perspective.

Yeah, I mean, that's a fucking loaded question. It's funny because, yeah, the way that we started, right, was I'm born and raised in the Bay, so I've been coming out with different apps and programming since I've been 14 years old. And every single app I would come out with sucked. Like, literally every single one sucked. I'd get like four daily active users. It'd be like my mom, my sister, my dad, and they deleted after a second, too. But you learn really early on about consumer behaviors and how you need to hit at a certain apex. So around four years ago, when I was a senior in college, a predecessor to Genius called Blend started blowing up. Started blowing up in all big ten schools I went to. University of Michigan. Really the genesis of how it blew up was that we basically announced that we're deleting every single user that came from Ohio State. When we announced that, it started going viral and everybody started downloading it, I dropped out of school 8 credits short and immediately was banished by my parents. I'm Indian, if you couldn't tell. So that was not okay. Moved back to the Bay Area, got a pretty good acquisition offer, actually for Blend, which is a pretty different product at the time. And then we saw a new void in the space, which was this medium of expression. We thought with the, you know, the musical ly, the TikTok era, that photos and videos were kind of reaching its climax of expression, and people are going to be looking for their next medium of expression. And Gen Z, there's this common misconception that. There's this common misconception about Gen Z. I feel that they're shy or whatever. They're kind of like different behind a computer. And I think they're more comfortable in front of a camera than any other audience. Right. Like, you can see their TikToks. You can see anything that they're posting online. And so by looking at this medium of expression, we decided that they're looking for a new fantastical way to be able to express themselves. And that's how we came upon Avatar. So we launched it in its very beta format probably a year and a half ago, just to see what people would create. And people weren't creating avatars that look just like themselves. They would create avatars that they wanted to look like. So somebody that looks like you, for example, would create an avatar with purple hair and a bunch of earrings and tatted out and whatever. Because that's expressing who they are on the inside, maybe not who they are on the outside. And so we saw this coupled with obviously everybody making a digital footprint and transitioning into this new world. We thought that avatars would be the next big play. And I think if you ask me, I passionately believe that the next Facebook event is going to be a network of avatars, that everybody's going to get back to their true authentic self and be able to therapeutically be able to connect with like minded individuals around the world. That's going to happen through their digital identity.

Very cool, very cool. So I'd love to take it back a step. So growing up you said that you came out with a lot of different apps. Where did this entrepreneurial drive come from at an early age?

I mean when you're born and raised in the bay, like, I mean you learn how to speak and then you learn how to code, right? So that's, that's just like the, it's in the water out there. Obviously, I think a lot of people try to mimic Silicon Valley and I appreciate that. And it's amazing to see the entrepreneurial spirit around the entire ecosystem in the world. And I'm such a big fan of it. But there's just like, you know, there's a certain things, there's certain small elements that you just can't replicate. And I think it's just second nature how you just immerse it to the system immediately. I played soccer my entire life and I would just look at the lineup and I'd look at the right forwards. Mom is this CEO left forwards, dad was this VC center, you know what I mean? And you're just like, you're just naturally in the system. So I think that became just something that I just loved and I was fascinated around. And yeah, it's just, it's just fun, dude. Like doing it. It's like I've yet to meet somebody that like does it and tries it at a young age and then like disposes of it and goes to the corporate world. It's just so fun. I'm sure like you're learning it yourself. Like, I mean you've been doing it yourself, right? With like, I don't know if you'd ever want to go after this and go be an anchor anywhere else. I think you want to be able to create the next big thing and be the anchor, right? So it's just fun. I think it's just born and raised in the bay and Just being around the right people.

Very cool. That's tight. And I wanted to ask. So with Genies and all the different campaigns that you guys do, from the marketing perspective, I'd love for you to go over how that whole thing came about when it comes to the campaign with Cheetos, the NBA, or different brands that you guys work with and how they integrate within the app and then across different social medias. Like, how does Genies go about a marketing campaign with a massive brand? Like, you guys have done so well.

Yeah. So, I mean, like, I'll tell you, everything that we've done so far in terms like brands, like, brand opportunity, whatever, has all been incidental. None of this shit was intentional. So, like, when you first released, like, none of it at all. Like, I. Like, it's crazy. When we first announced genies, the goal was just to test it with 25,000 Gen Z kids to see how they would build genies. And we figured that the best way to be able to test and get a cohort of 25,000 people immediately to start using it was to get, like, a couple celebrities to post about or whatever. But we didn't have any money at the time, so we were kind of just creating Genies for celebrities. And I would DM them on Instagram, be like, bro, what do you think of this? Or whatever. We saw that the celebrities would immediately start posting on their accounts, and we're like, damn, this is working pretty well. And we got a huge influx of users that went from just creating a static genie for Jared Goff turned into, okay, Offset would just DM us and be like, yo, dude, can I actually have my genie dropping my next song? So it went to dropping the next song and dropping the next album on our end. We're like, as long as they post and they promote our product, yeah, it makes sense. So we did that, whatever, and they start posting it. So it went from static images to self promos of, like, music videos, whatever, to then finally this happened a couple times where I think it was specifically with Offset, where he had a conflict. I think he had to do something for Vogue that day. And he went kind of like, almost like missing, and people couldn't find where he was, whatever. And then his management reached out to us and was like, hey, listen, don't know where Offset is right now. He might be wrapped up with some things, but he has to do an activation with Vogue today. Can his genie just do it for him? We're like, yeah, 100%. So we went through that process paired up the two. And that kind of hit a light bulb. And with Jared Goff, same thing happened with Red Bull. He had a conflict, he had a game that day. He hit us up. He's like, look, listen, like, I have to do six things for Red Bull this year. I'm not able to fulfill their request. Can my genie just step in for me? And so as we were able to step in as the concierge, a lot of brands started to look at us as kind of this great middleman that was able to one, be 100% reliable on time, like whatever, be able to create stuff on an hour's notice. Our technology is kind of like the bread and butter of this company. So being able to programmatically put all these assets together on an hour notice without having to go through like drawing things from scratch or whatever. It's really the tech behind the avatar. This, they kind of looked at us as like, shit. This is like a unit. This is a language that actually speaks Gen Z. Right? Like people. We started to see that the avatars performed just as well as the humans themselves. And as soon as brands started to see that, we got inbound from Gucci, from Pepsi, as you were saying, with Cheetos and a bunch of other companies. So it's proven to be a really cool, time efficient, cost efficient way to speak to the Gen Z audience that I think has been new and authentic. And it's a win win. Brands get access to celebrities that would normally not get access to. And celebrities are making unprecedented deal flow and money that they didn't really have to lift up a finger for.

Yeah, that's so cool. Because like these, these celebrities and people, they're able to like duplicate themselves and do brand deals with their genie. Correct. Where it's like they don't physically need to promote it with their face. It's their genie in the product collaboration that creates a unique campaign.

Yeah, they don't have to do shit. They go to bed, 50 grand hits their bank account, they wake up, they're like, oh shit, my genie just did something for me.

Right?

So like Kyrie Irving. Yeah, I mean like that's. And that's like the thesis that like Kyrie, like Russell Westbrook for example, he's playing basketball 24 7, he's super competitive, but he gets a lot of brands that come hit him up saying like, hey, if you show up at this soccer field to do a four hour photo shoot with Pizza Hut and post on your Instagram, we'll pay you like X million bucks. He's like no, I'd rather keep playing basketball. We're like, dude, that's millions of dollars. Let your genie for you. You keep playing basketball and it's a slight discount, but at the same time you're making money, brand got access to you got it done in three days instead of contract negotiations for whatever. So it's a win win.

Got it. That's super cool. And I noticed too, you guys are integrated into a lot of different apps. Can you kind of break down if someone's listening right now and they let's say go download Genies today. Where can they utilize genies across different social medias and their messaging platforms? Where's their know where can they get.

It at Instagram, Snapchat, iMessage? If you're in Japan, which we just open up to offices there in Tokyo, line, I'm in Korea, kakao in China, WeChat. So all messaging, all major messaging platforms.

Super cool. And I noticed too, from a development side of it, if people are watching this and they have an app or they have a platform, you guys can figure out like you just said, ways to integrate into these different platforms. And how does that work when you guys are looking to be integrated into an app like 20, which is how I figured out about you guys. How does it work with the integration process? I'm super curious about that.

We have a software development kit. We're the only avatar of this caliber that's able to integrate to third party services without them having to do that much heavy lifting. So we have a software development kit. Our APPG 2.0 of that is going to be launching this summer as well. Developers just have to reach out to us, apply, and then we look at the partnership opportunity and then we're able to integrate genies natively into their platform so they don't have like on 20, for example, in like two months you won't have to leave, you won't have to leave the app to be able to create a Genie. You can create a genie within their platform itself, which is like interesting because we had thousands of businesses over the past year wanting to create their own avatar, but it's such a huge time commitment and such a resource allocation that they'd rather just integrate ours natively into their platform so they don't have to worry about it.

That's super cool. What does like from like conception to scaling with the team and everything. How have you gone about as CEO and founder of building culture within the organization? And what do you believe creates good culture?

Yeah, culture is everything. For us, I know that sounds cliche, but when you're in a notoriously difficult space, like consumer social tech, like, you have to have a team that's gonna be able to ride through a bunch of bullshit. And that's what we did, right? Like, the first 20 apps we launched were absolute failures, like, utter failures. But it builds thick skin. You're able to recognize the industry in humans. So I think a lot of people talk about, like, if you do a startup, you get your mba. If you're in consumer and social tech, I feel like you get your master's in sociology and philosophy, right? Because you're just studying humans 247 and trying to figure out what actually makes them tick. So I think for us, like, there's one thing that I'm actually getting, like, tattooed. It's like the cornerstone of this is something that I said in 2015, and we haven't left it since. But it's remain paranoid, but never panic. That is like the ultimate. That is like, the cornerstone of this company. So we're continuously questioning everything. We're always saying, like, why would that not work? We're remaining paranoid 24 7. But we never panic about the situation. We're always methodically and pragmatically addressing it. So that's one. And then also 20% execution. The 20% execution means that in the social consumer world, if I go outside right now and I pull five people off the street and I bring them into this office and I say, hey, listen, this isn't an app we're gonna launch. What do you recommend? Our marketing strategy or go to market strategy should be 80% of the shit that they say is gonna be exactly what we say. But the difference has to be in the last 20% obsession that we bring to that meeting that differentiates us from anybody else. So we have to be. If you notice everything that we do, whether it's go to market, whether it's. The product is unconventional, unorthodox, and it. Because we take a 20% mindset to it. So we're very diehard. We have those two cornerstones as kind of like our main mandates for this company and the culture here. If you meet people here, it's like it's in their blood. It's very much like, this isn't like, your job. This is your lifestyle.

Yeah. Very cool. What. What. It. What excites? What excites you? Just, you have a lot of stuff going on from the different avenues of the company. What are you most excited about and where do you spend most of your.

Time within the company itself. Yeah, dude, I'm like the tastemaker. And celebrity stuff's really cool and like every single day like major celebrities are using it and that's awesome. But I'm passionately obsessed with how does every single human on earth start using a genie in their everyday lives? And so I'm really obsessed with kind of like that North Star. How do we get every single common person to be obsessed with it? And I think you'll see some stuff that we're releasing this summer. I think that's kind of on the right track. And like I said, I passionately believe that the next Facebook event is going to be a network of avatars. And I think you're starting to see a lot of the social giants and big guys in the space are kind of gravitating towards that notion as well. So that's kind of like for me it's chasing that and just being obsessed with product. Like product 24 7.

Very cool. That's so tight, man. I'm sure like when it comes to all the different apps you've created, if someone's out there, let's say a young entrepreneur, and they're looking to create a new app, what have you learned? Like you said, you said utter failures. The past has been what have you learned from developing, launching different apps? And what would you recommend to a young entrepreneur looking to get into that field?

I would say a couple things. One, start as early as you can. So if you're in a high school or if you're in college, like you have free rent, you're living at your parents house, you have more dorms and like you're getting like your food most of the time, most cases getting paid for somehow to start taking those gambles early on. Because even though I'm only 27, I feel like I'm literally 55 or 60. Because when you spend five to eight years in social consumer tech, it's literally centuries, right? Like you see so many trends come and go and you study things and I had the privilege of being able to at least have my housing when I was in college and then also in high school, more specifically in high school where I could test stuff, I could fail and the failure didn't mean that shit. I couldn't feed my kids or anything like that, right? So to take as many shots as you can early on. And I think too, if you get technical, you're able to do things a lot quicker and you're able to iterate a lot quicker rather without having to bring on or search for a co founder or search for launch a development team in India or whatever everybody's doing nowadays. If you can get a technical mindset that's going to help you a lot.

Got it. When it comes to the scalability of team, start with a core group and how you guys scaled to the, to the situation that you guys are in in terms of like company and number.

Of people wise dude, like we were four people for like for the longest time, just four guys. Like just didn't have an office. Like even as recent as last summer we were, we were like working out of my co founder's apartment. Didn't like just going from place to place, didn't have a lot of money and then went into, moved into an apartment above a taco shop. Like we always called ourselves like kids above a taco shop. Here's tacos por favor. In Venice. It's fucking fire. Best chorizo of all time. But we were out there for a long time and then things can change overnight. Like literally change overnight for us. We went from four to now 30 and now we're on track to be 60 in the next two months. So it can change overnight depending. And that's just like the beautiful part of this game, especially in social consumer is that you can fail for so long but as soon as things start working you see a huge uptick and things can change overnight. It's not like a B2B platform per se. And so like scaling I think is going back to your conversation around culture. Like you need to make sure that it has a proper trickle down effect and that you do take the time to make sure that culture is a part of everybody's bloodline. It's part of, it's innately part of their personality. And so I think if you talk to any one of the 30 that are part of us today, even though majority of us are technical, everybody has that same mindset I was talking about if you say 20% or paranoia or some of these cornerstones verbiage, it warrants action. It's not just random shit that we put up on our walls or anything like that. It's like if we say like hey, 20% execution, like you see people change right there on spot, right? So I think it's that it feels like a family for sure. But everybody knows how to go from friends to professional like this at a snap of a finger. So scaling is all about culture dude, and bringing on the right people while still remaining true to your roots.

Yep. I love that man. And I want to ask because on the Genie's profile on Instagram, you guys follow one account and that's humans. And it says we invest capital in the early stage companies we love. I'd love for you to touch on that because I noticed that and I'd love to ask about what is humans and how do you guys invest in different early stage companies?

Yeah, so humans came about. Like I have a die hard passion, like basically like in my opinion, right, if you're actually like a true entrepreneur, right, Everybody says they're an entrepreneur nowadays, but if you're like a true fucking entrepreneur, like you have a thousand ideas a day, you don't just obsess about like your own idea, whatever, you may only be able to act on your idea. But like I think of a different, like a microwave efficient platform. Like I think of different ideas all the time. And what's frustrating is that sometimes, you know, not sometimes, all the time you have to focus all your efforts on genies. But I come across a lot of cool ideas that I want to be able to back but and live vicariously through them and be able to help them. And I think it also helps our product because you're able to feed your brain, right? Your brain's able to think about many different problems, whatever. So humans came about from twofold. One, from exactly what I was just talking about, and then two, for the Genie's avatar agency, we would get approached by Gucci and Pepsi and Apple and all these big companies and they have multimillion dollar budgets and that's great. And then you have smaller companies that don't have those budgets. But we're sitting there being like, damn, we could light them up, right? Like we could get 100 of our avatars blowing them up literally tomorrow. We can add marketing collateral that they would work six years to get. We can give it to them in six hours, whatever, but they don't have the budget for us. So we were sitting there being like, well, why don't we invest in some of these companies, be able to get some meaningful ownership, but then they'd be able to take advantage of our avatar agency and light them up. And so it's almost a partnership in that respect. And so that's how, that's kind of how that came about. It only came about two months ago. We've invested in a couple companies that we're going to be announcing later this year. Right now we're not announcing them, but it's been a lot of fun meeting a lot of really dope Cool people really early on we invest in seed, pre seed type companies, idea phase companies, and investing in the entrepreneur for sure.

That's tight. That's super cool, man. That's something like for me, long term I see myself getting into that. So it's like fascinates me. With that being said though, when you're looking at new companies to get involved with, how do you look at it as investor? Because like you just said, you get involved with like idea phase companies. Is that like you said like before, the concept is actually created and people are just shooting you ideas or how does someone, let's say, has a phenomenal idea that they think they're at the next big thing? How do you go about getting in touch with these people? Or just do you reach out? Do you have places where people can submit them or how does that look?

So fortunately we had a lot of. We just get a lot of DMs really on Instagram. Just a lot of really cool people on Instagram. And so that's kind of how we've been funneling that process so far. And I think just because of the genie's popularity amongst tastemakers and people that they follow, whatever, there's entrepreneurs that have been following the story for quite some time and they'll just DM our account. So we get a bunch of submissions just through Instagram and that's, that's all I've been looking at. Right. It's like that's kind of like my inbox. And so it's. Yeah, it's been kind of like a pretty chill process. Like it's been very opportunistic. We do believe some viability, like coming out with something lean that we can like look at. But we definitely, our expertise is in social and consumer. So the investments that we've made so far have been in that. But our thesis and our mandate almost always has to be can we leverage our avatar agency or can we leverage our SDK to be able to add meaningful, I guess, sweat capital past the financials. Right. So it's like of course we'll stroke like a 25k check to up to a million dollar check. We'll write anywhere in between those. But we need to be able to leverage our avatar agency to be able to benefit the company and stick to our mandate.

Very cool. That's tight. That's very cool. I'm curious from more like personal perspective, where do you spend your time? Free time just outside of running your company.

Honestly work out a lot. Biggest Niner fan of all time. Like Biggest football fan you've ever met. Like, Die Hard Niner fan. Die Hard Alex Smith fan. He's been out of the league for a little bit, so waiting for him to get back. But yeah, it's been, dude, Like I said, it's a lifestyle, so it's kind of hard to be outside of fit. I do force myself to do different shit and activities because I think it helps your product brain. I think specifically with whether it's working out or going on hikes or whatever. But yeah, with something like this, especially with what we've seen over the last six months, it's kind of hard not to do or want to do. Genies 24 7. So it's just been, it's football, just run my friends and doing stupid shit. But otherwise, no, it's all genius.

That's so cool, man. So you're 27 now, right? You said when it comes to, like, your early childhood, you talked about playing soccer. What were some of the passion you had early on? Because I know you said you learned how to code early on. Like, what was young Akash doing in his elementary, middle, high school days?

Doing a bunch of dumb shit all the time.

I mean, I was.

I think a lot of it was what Sports was, like, a big part of my life. So playing, like, every sport. Soccer was my main one. I think, like, music's, like, a huge passion of mine as well. Just like, going to, like, Bay Area has some, like, sick, sick culture and history, like the hyphae movement and stuff back then, which I was idiotically obsessed with. I look back, I'm like, Jesus. Like, if you look back on, like, what I dressed like back then, it was unacceptable being words. So I was doing, like, a bunch of stuff like that. My passion, like, really for soccer is what drove me. And I think, like, when soccer was over, I kind of used that passion to fuel my entrepreneurship and those type of spirits, whatever. But, yeah, I think it was like, sports, chasing girls, just, like, running around, like music. It was a lot of fun.

Very cool, man. Very cool. I'm curious. Cause obviously I'm having you on my podcast right now. Do you do a lot of podcasts? Public speaking, talking about your company? A social perspective? Or is this something you don't do that often?

It's funny, like, last year when things started taking off for, like, the very first time, got a lot of inbound requests and was saying no to a lot of them just because from our perspective, we wanted to just focus on the company and build that. And it's not Something that I do, but literally, I think in the last two weeks we were like, you know what? Like, it's time to, like, start opening up a little bit and going out. So been speaking on quite a few stages as of late, and then also, like, just doing like, a few talks here and there, but pretty selective, I guess, with the time. Are you hearing my Slack notifications go.

Off, by the way? A little bit, but it's all good.

No, but I think, yeah, it's been. Whatever, dude. It's been fun to be able to talk to people that I like to talk to. You seem like a really cool guy, so not that often, but when it seems right and fun and chill. Yeah, then I'm all for it. Yep, for sure.

I'm curious because I talk a lot about personal branding and interview a lot of CEOs and founders. When it comes to the way you utilize social media personally, how does that look like in your life regarding how you use it? Inbound requests, reaching out to people. How is Akash, as a person using social media to build a company or connect with people outside of the name brand?

Yeah, no, no. I mean, Instagram is everything to us. It has been. When we send out investor shareholder updates, we say, if you want good, frequent updates, you follow us on Instagram. We probably raised 8 million bucks just from Instagram DMs, you know, like, we like, literally just DMing people, seeing if they were interested, whatever. And then we raised 8 million bucks, like a straight up round came from it. So we use Instagram and social 90% for what we want to be able to do and tell our story and then be able to educate key decision makers about what we're doing. So it's literally everything for us. Like, I think a year and a half ago, when we ran our first wait list to get onto Genies, we didn't like, do like a classic email. We said, enter in your Instagram handle and we'll build our huge, huge Rolodex of that. And then when we're able to release our product, we built actually Instagram bot that slid into everybody's DM saying that your Genie was now available. So, like, Instagram is literally like the key cornerstone for us that we're launching our TikTok actually next week. So that will probably be our next playing field.

That is. That's so tight, man. So I'm curious, when it comes to, like, you say, Instagram raising rounds, when you guys were first raising capital, did you guys do a seed round? Series A? What did that look like if you're obviously want to open up to that. I'm super curious.

Yeah, Seed round did a, did a party round and this is like right when we kind of like went into Genies. But it was, I think it was like two and a half million maybe. And it was from nea. We like the, the big venture capital firm in the Bay invested in like LinkedIn, Dropbox, a bunch of other box whatever, Foundation Capital, first investors in Netflix, Trinity Ventures, first investors in Starbucks. Those are like kind of like a key Sam Hill investors. Then we had guys in New York and then in la we had caa. So people like that invested and then like went through a bunch of up and downs, dude. Like we almost failed like three or four times and I almost went under as a company like three or four times. You have those near death experiences. That's when you know you're working out of like your friend's apartment, whatever, just trying to hustle, but then saw some uptick, raise a series A. And then, yeah, I think now we've raised close to 40 million bucks total. It's been from a lot of like really cool people more recently, some strategics as well. But I think like we keep our cap table very, very creative and colorful. So there's creative tension. So you have like three different buckets. You have the venture capitalists and then you have the accredited entrepreneurs and then you have strategic celebrities. And I think that's really important when you're trying to appeal to a melting pot of different cultures and personalities. You want to be able to have that on your side as well. Because I think people can help in so many different ways.

Right.

Like a check is just one way to be able to help. But you know, we have Sean Rad, who's the founder of Tinder, he's invested in us and for him to be able to run product sessions with us is very helpful. To be able to have somebody like Jim Breyer, who was the very first investor in Facebook and he just invested in us to be able to walk us through what it's like to go with Zuckerberg and Sheryl from Seed all the way up to where they are now. And he was on the board only up until a few years ago. Right. So getting insights like that from strategic key personnel is really important to us.

That's so sick, man. I appreciate you sharing that. I think that's number one for any entrepreneur, like taking it through that process. And what you just explained is like goal for every entrepreneur that's looking to scale and level up. What advice would you give to someone starting a new company that's looking to raise capital? What would you say the first couple of steps if you were to simplify it?

The funny thing is that there's two vanity metrics that companies flaunt all the time. One, how much cash have you raised? And then two, how big is your company? And the truth is, you want to be able to start your company with as low of a number as possible for both of those two. Right. If I can IPO my company with $1 raised and one co founder, that's a really, really successful business. Both lucratively, whatever. Right. So I think that's one thing to keep in mind, is that those vanity metrics are there a lot of the time just for bragging and for boasting. But at the end of the day, if you can do it with as least amount of capital as possible raised, and amount of people involved in your company, then that's a great situation to be in. That being said, if you do need a raise, which we're in a world where a lot of companies are getting started, where revenue is not required, and we were one of them in the very beginning, you want to bring on people that you can actually trust and that you get along with person is always more important than the actual cash itself. So if you're raising from a vc, make sure you work with a general partner and you like that general partner, and you make a decision based on that person. It's all about the people.

Got it. Very cool, man. I have two more questions, man. So from where you guys are now to where you see guys going, what are some cool things that you're excited about that you could share with the people listening, moving into 2020 with the things that are going to be integrated into Genies and everything you have going on, if you want to share.

Yeah. So 2019 was pretty much like a year of tastemakers and celebrities. For us, 2020 is gonna be the year of consumers. Right. So we're bringing a lot of the success that we just nailed with the celebrity and bringing it on to the everyday person. So I think this summer, early fall, you're gonna see some stuff that we roll out for the everyday person that they're gonna be able to achieve what they see celebrities doing on Instagram today. So that's, I think, one. And what was the second part of that question?

Yeah, just overall what you were excited about when it comes to the rollout of these new things.

And I think what you're gonna See also the is going to change a little bit, so you're going to see it in a really cool way. But the aesthetic right now is 2D. It's Pixar, it's Disney. That's really cool. You're going to see it take its next evolution step. So keep an eye out for that.

Very cool, man. Last thing to really wrap it up, man. I'm 19 years old right now. I have a lot of young listeners that are listening on this podcast. Just from the whole journey of what you've built, the different apps that have you've made and have failed to now having this massively successful company raising massive rounds from strategic investors, what would you tell your 19 year old self that's really starting their first company, that's starting their first application? What advice do you give to a young entrepreneur today after the journey so far?

This might, yeah, I mean it's probably bothered a lot of parents, but I'd say like, do it earlier, you know, like if I was, if I was like, I dropped out of college, like I would have told myself, drop out of high school, you know, like I could go back. I'd be like, go as early as you can. It's so difficult to do a startup even when you're 100% full time. The chances of you being able to succeed when you're 100% full time is like 1%.01%, right? So imagine when you have to do that plus school or plus a sport or whatever, you dramatically decrease those odds. So the sooner that you can start and start failing and start learning, right? Like, I'm glad that I started failing when I was 14 versus when I started failing when I was 27 and raising 40 million from a bunch of different people, right? It's like I've taken in 10 plus years of learnings to be able to apply to right now while still being able to have a pulse of what I think is popular amongst Gen Z millennials. Being able to be in this really, really unique position has only come from starting really early on. So I think the earlier you can start, the earlier that you can sacrifice. The earlier that you can be able to take on that pressure, the better.

I love it, man. I definitely. That was solid. Just to really wrap it up, where's the best place for people to follow you, to follow Genies for everything that's.

Happening moving into 2020 Instagram, I'm @ Akosh Nigum and then Eans.

Got it. Well, my man, I appreciate you coming on the show, man. This is super interesting because it's funny. Like I told you before, I connected with the guys from 20. They put me onto Genie's, and I was just fascinated by the whole concept. And I'm a young person myself. Right. 19 years old. And to see how you guys are tapping into the culture, into the celebrity culture. I'm excited to see you guys evolve, and I definitely appreciate you taking the time and it's definitely my pleasure to have you on today. I know a lot of people learn from it.

Thanks so much, man. It's great hanging out. Great to meet you. Yep.

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